Dark Side of the Carton

Super Mario Galaxy just showed up at the house and with it came a pretty nifty Commemorative Coin. Apparently these coins were given out for pre-ordering the game, although I am not sure which store was actually giving them out. Regardless, here are a few pictures of the swag.

I’m generally a rather reserved person. I tend to keep most of my thoughts to myself. I’ve always been like this. I am finding out that the ability to wear your thoughts and emotions on your sleeve might actually be a good thing. There is something pretty liberating about just blurting it all out and putting it all out there on the table for the world to see.

I won’t go into details about how or why I’ve come to this realization, but if you are a reserved person like me, give it a shot. The next time someone asks a question or makes a comment, just lay out your thoughts and see how it feels. I think you just might like it and make a habit out of it.

I also think that most people appreciate the honesty, even if they don’t particularly care for or agree with what you are saying about the topic at hand.

I recently setup the free/open source version of SugarCRM to manage some of my business contacts in the gaming industry. I went with a web based solution so I could open up portions of the data to my staff. After selecting SugarCRM as my tool of choice, I setup space for it and got to the installation portion. On step 2 of the installation, I got a nasty message

Writable Session Save Path (/tmp) Not A Valid Directory

I started doing a little research and realized it was the php configuration value for the session.save_path variable. My webshost runs phpsuexec, which is related to security and resource usage and is really out of the scope of this conversation. What that means is that you have to override php.ini configuration values through a php.ini file and not through .htaccess. Using the htaccess method results in a wonderful 500 error message.

Resolving the issue, which I figured would take 5 minutes, was actually a rather frustrating process. In theory, I should have been able to slap a php.ini file in this new directory with the following line:

session.save_path = /tmp

That didn’t seem to work. After trying variations of paths for the save_path I realized that the wonderful installer was also telling me that the version of PHP I was running, 5.x, was an untested version. I run PHP 5 for it’s OO/class support and it was apparently cascading down to this new directory. I went ahead and changed my .htaccess file to use PHP 4.x instead. To do this, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

instead of the following, which utilizes PHP 5 on my webspace:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

Once I did that, I started to make a little progress, but it wasn’t until I happened upon a posting about the session.save_path value that I got things working. Apparently using absolute paths isn’t necessary and simply changing the value in your php.ini to the following resolved my problems and allowed me to get past the second step of my installation:

session.save_path = tmp

So there you have it, if your install is throwing the above error, just update your files to include these values and get to using SugarCRM.

.htaccess

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

php.ini

session.save_path = tmp

Did I blink and get dropped into the land of idiots and not realize it? Holy Smokes. If I wasn’t so busy already, I’d do a little reading and see why exactly people act like morons when they have the tiniest bit of anonymity. I mean, I can partially see why people on the Internet believe their actions have no consequences, but people in cars with the tiniest bit of tint on their windows act like it is completely out of the realm of possibilities that you’ll get out of your car and give them a proper ass-whipping right there on the spot.

What prompted this post was the boiling over of my ability to shovel it inside anymore. On the way to work, I deal with idiots daily. I understand this is part of existing as a human. What I don’t understand is why it seems to be on the rise exponentially. People pulling in front of me when there is clearly no room and acting like I did something wrong by not doing everything within my power to get out of their precious way. People parking in the middle of the damned road. The madness just won’t end. I’ve about had it. I say it is high time we take all the warning labels off, not that these type of people read them anyway, and let nature take its course.

I don’t like to see people die or even get hurt, but it’s high time that natural selection kicked in and eliminated some of the pondscum from our gene pool.

There are a lot of tools out there for doing basic port scans on your edge devices. These tools are unnecessary if you access to a remote machine outside your network, but they come in real handy if you don’t. I saw this new tool on LifeHacker.com today and it’s a very nice simple tool that also packs in a GeoLocation feature that was more accurate than anything I’ve seen to date.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you need a remote port scanner, be sure to think YouGetSignal.com… or don’t.

Back when I had a disposable income that would buy more than a pack of chewing gun I used to buy all sorts of expensive gadgets. Those days are long gone. Having a family tends to do that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The reality is that having a family keeps things in focus for me and forces me to be this frugal person. Trust me when I say that I’ve become a total bargain shopper. I don’t buy anything at full price anymore and that is ok.

Switching gears a bit, the next generation console war is pointless. I mean, the competition generated by the ebb and flow of the industry is good for everyone involved. The next generation dvd format war, however, is totally stupid. So stupid that I sometimes want to bang my head against the wall until I pass out. Ok, I’m not that invested in the format war that I’d knock myself out over it, but it still irritates me.

From an IT standpoint I really like Blu-Ray. The higher disc capacity rocks and the idea of a 4 or 8 layer disc with 25-50GB per layer makes me salivate. On the other hand, I don’t trust Sony and their licensing. I also don’t want my old DVD collection to be useless and have to keep another player around to play them. HD-DVD satisfies that aspect of my needs.

The other factor is price. HD-DVD players are dropping like rocks in price and the Blu-Ray ones are not dropping as quick. With that said, Wal-Mart went all Black Friday a little early today with a special on Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD-DVD player. They had the things marked down to $98. $98 borders on insanity and would definitely move a lot of players. I know it convinced me to go buy one, and at present the only way a Blu-Ray player is going in my home is if I somehow end up with a PS3.

I also bought Transformers on HD-DVD. Now I can’t wait to get this setup and running. I’m so very excited. $10 says I can’t find my extra HDMI cable now that I need it.

If you’ve done any custom IP work in the phpBB world, then you know that phpBB stores IP addresses in a hex format. This is simple, but you’ll definitely need to convert back to plain IP format (in octets) if you want to display that information. I am sure phpBB probably has some functions for converting between the 2, but it was easier and faster to just write my own. Here they are for your convenient use:

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function ip_to_hex($ip)
// Purpose: Takes a user's IP and converts it to the hex value needed by phpBB
// Arguements: $ip - The remote user's IP address
// Returns: $hex - The user's IP in hex
{
$pieces = explode(".", $ip);
$hex0 = dechex($pieces[0]);
$hex1 = dechex($pieces[1]);
$hex2 = dechex($pieces[2]);
$hex3 = dechex($pieces[3]);
if(strlen($hex0) < 2) $hex0 = "0".$hex0;
if(strlen($hex1) < 2) $hex1 = "0".$hex1;
if(strlen($hex2) < 2) $hex2 = "0".$hex2;
if(strlen($hex3) < 2) $hex3 = "0".$hex3;
$hex = $hex0 . $hex1 . $hex2 . $hex3;
return $hex;
}

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function hex_to_ip($hex)
// Purpose: Takes an IP in hex form and converts it to the plain IP form
// Arguements: $hex - The user's IP in hex
// Returns: $ip - The remote user's IP address
{
$pieces[0] = substr($hex, 0, 2);
$pieces[1] = substr($hex, 2, 2);
$pieces[2] = substr($hex, 4, 2);
$pieces[3] = substr($hex, 6, 2);
$ip0 = hexdec($pieces[0]);
$ip1 = hexdec($pieces[1]);
$ip2 = hexdec($pieces[2]);
$ip3 = hexdec($pieces[3]);
$ip = $ip0.".".$ip1.".".$ip2.".".$ip3;
return $ip;
}